Text-to-speech hotkey in Ubuntu

Want to simply select some text and have Ubuntu speak it back to you? Mikey’s fog shows a nice solution of how to do this using Festival voices (the default one is quite OK, actually).

Also, for setting the keyboard shortcut you don’t need to edit gconf manually. Simply go to System settings – Keyboard – Shortcuts – Custom Shortcuts – press the “+” button and enter the path to your speak script. You can then enter a new accelerator directly on your keyboard.

It would be nice to have this functionality as a part of Ubuntu or at least packaged for easy installation. Maybe a future project…